MSI 890GXM-G65 Motherboard Review :: Layout

Starting in the upper right hand corner we find that MSI has put the COM1 jumper in this position. Below that is the 4-pin power connector for the board. The MOSFETs are covered by a heatsink with a heatpipe leading to the 890GX Northbridge. The CPU area is clear of obstacles and there are four PWMs for four phase power on the board. The CPU Fan header lies above the memory slots.

There are four DIMM slots for up to 16GB of DDR3 memory in Dual Channel mode. The memory is color coded with each pair of like colored memory slots making up a DIMM channel. The board can take up to DDR3-2100MHz when the CPU is overclocked. The memory controller is on the AMD CPU itself, meaning that the CPU supports DDR3 1333MHz out of the box but higher when you overclock.

Southbridge

4-pin power

Back of PCB

USB Headers

The bottom of the board starts off with the Trusted Program Module JUMPER. To the left of that is the IDE connector. Above that is the 24-pin power connector. To the left of the DIMM Sockets is the SB850 Southbridge. AMD has not as of yet incorporated all of the Northbridge functionality into the CPU as Intel has so there are two separate chips for the chipset, the SB850 and 890GX.

Next to the IDE port are five SATA 6 Gb/second ports, with four facing sideways and one facing straight up. The common usage of SATA 6 Gb/second is necessary due to the possible confusion between SATA 3.0 and SATA 3.0 Gb/second ports which is called SATA 2. The front panel headers are next to the SATA ports. The left side of the board starts off with the LPT and four USB headers.

The MSI 890GXM-G65 board has two PCI Express x16 slots, a PCI Express x1 slot and a PCI slot, which allows the user to install two graphics cards. Note that the second PCI Express x16 slot is set for x8 operation and if one card is installed on the motherboard it should be set in the first slot. When two cards are installed the motherboard switches from x16/x0 to x8/x8 for the two PCI Express slots.

LPT

SATA 6Gbps

Fintek

IDE+24-pin power

A red dip switch is next with on atop two switches and the numbers 1 2 below the switches. This is for the Easy OC Switch which I will describe in the BIOS and overclocking section of the review. The CD-In and front panel audio connectors are also located here. The onboard audio is provided by a Realtek ALC889 CODEC which is fully High Definition Audio compliant. This CODEC supports multi-streaming with the ability to do 7.1+2 channel simultaneously.

NEC chip

Expansion

ALC889

Rear I/O

The rear I/O on this board consists of a PS/2 keyboard or mouse port, 4 USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports, a RJ-45 LAN jack, an optical SPDIF-out port, an external SATA port controlled by the SB850 Southbridge, six audio jacks for the onboard audio, a DVI-D port, a VGA port and a HDMI port. The exclusion of a second PS/2 port is logical as most people will use USB keyboards and mice. The DVI-D and HDMI port make this board a good fit for HTPC owners as those are the most common TV connectors in use today.